Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Tiddlywiki - Stat Blocks

I've been toying around with stat blocks in Tiddlywiki, trying to come up with a better way to lay them out without creating too many tiddly-related headaches with formatting and such. I'm still not sure I've gotten it right, but here are three work in progress versions of the Akinak, primordial minions of Anamika. These are screenshots taken from Firefox, so they're pretty much what I see at the table.

The Original
This is the format I've been using til now. As I discovered during the last session, it takes up a bit too much vertical space. I'm also not completely satisfied with the structure.

Original Layout

Revision - All Table All the Time
This is a first cut at a completely table-based stat block. Tables in Tiddlywiki, especially tables with changing column counts, get a bit ugly to edit, so I'm not happy with this from the creation point of view. It's not saving a lot of vertical space either. Also, I suck at color schemes.

Tabular Format

Revision Two - Hybrid
This is a mix of text and table. It suffers from some of the same layout issues as the full table above, though it avoids the annoyance of HTML breaks in text blocks to create multi-line table entries. It seems a bit cleaner overall.

Hybrid Format

All in all, I'm not sure any of these are right. The last seems closest to what I want and pulls the combat-related stuff into a concise block. What do you think?